Beautiful Photos, if Barely Photography

Barely photography. That’s how Sasha Frere-Jones, 43, characterized the images he takes and shares on his blogs, Songs You Taught Me (on Tumblr) and S/FJ, and through Twitter.

The images he shares are often closely cropped recordings of surfaces; digital crayon rubbings.

“I sometimes don’t think that I really take photographs so much as I frame things that I see,” he said. “A lot of it has to do with the residue of something else. Something that’s been burned or abraded, something’s been scratched up; there’s a light reflecting off of something else, and there ends up being a pattern. It looks something like a painting a lot of the time.”

Mr. Frere-Jones photographs with an iPhone and a point-and-shoot camera, enjoying the technical constraints imposed by each. In 2003, he pointed a camera at the sky in Times Square. “I got back this green and purple thing, when I was looking at a blue and purple thing,” he recalled. “I thought: ‘Great — this is the effect I get from this piece of equipment. It’s like a stomp box.'”

He took the picture of a disco ball that opens the video at a concert, using his iPhone. “The whole place lit up. I turned. I took the photo. What came out was nothing like what I was seeing, but I know how the phone behaves and I had a feeling something interesting would happen and I got lucky.”

More than 12,000 people follow Mr. Frere-Jones on Twitter. These messages as well as his blog posts, which can rise to the level of poetry, are often cryptic. “I like the idea of it not having a utility,” he said.

That cryptic approach is not universally appreciated. “I’ve gotten e-mails from people about my blog that are largely encouraging in tone but are essentially saying to me, ‘I don’t understand what you’re doing,'” he said. “I think my mom gave up reading my blog after about six months. I think she was one of the first to bail.”

Mr. Frere-Jones is a member of both the bands Piñata and Calvinist and has been a staff writer and pop-music critic for The New Yorker since 2004. In his years as a blogger, Facebook, Flickr, Picasa and other photo forums have been started. Inexpensive digital cameras and cellphones equipped with cameras have proliferated. On the Web, the way images are created, stored, shared and absorbed is the subject of debate.

For his part, Mr. Frere-Jones argues that “there is room in the world for a beautiful high-resolution photo of a tree, and there is also room in the world for photographs of beef-flavored Gummi bears.”

Kristen Joy Watts, a former New York Times intern, is a content strategist at R/GA in New York.